The Financial Times – of all frickin places – just published a story on how high fashion labels, such as Chanel and Jean Paul Gautier – have recently been using tattoo-esque designs and working with actual tattoo artists to create new fashion.

It’s no secret tattoos have been around for ages, usually gotten by those who wish to adorn their body with an interesting design, beautifully rendered portrait or some statement they hold dear. Unfortunately, for a long time, proud tattooed people were thought of as ‘dangerous’ element of society.

Well, society has long a quiet obsession with the counterculture, which includes tattoo art and the actual practice of tattooing. As more people who don’t look like they would kick your ass for looking them directly in the eye got tattoos, they became more acceptable to society as a whole.

So the stuffy, Cosby sweater-wearing, suburban dad eventually had to get over a tattoo-phobia once the teen he’d once gotten used to yelling at to turn down the Quiet Riot turned 18 and got one. Mom and Pops learn in sitcom fashion that tattoos don’t mean you’re a criminal, Junior (or Juniette) gets a kick-ass skull-and-crossbones, Rolling Stones lips or their favorite Twister Sister lyric, and culture takes one tiny step forward. But I digress.

“A little subversion, however it comes, is the reason why this look works,” Lauren Cochrane writes for the Financial Times. Fashion designers have long tried to stay ‘edgy’ – the reason why the photos of catwalk models’ clothes look like an art school just threw up on that poor woman! Adopting a tried-and-true counterculture art

form like tattooing for designs basically does the work for them.

And some of the designs aren’t half bad. Like that’s a pretty nice travel bag – it’s just a helluva ask for seven grand. If you’re dropping that kind of bread, wouldn’t you rather just have a personalized piece of permanent artwork you could carry around without worry about the weight of it?

That’s why – if these folks wanted to be subversive for real, they’d drop the dresses and get some ink on their flesh!